10 Time Wasting Tasks You Can Automate in 30 Minutes | Small Biz Trends

July 20, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Time is one of the most precious assets to business owners. But with so many time wasting tasks on your to-do list, you need to take control of your work or it will take control of you. Luckily, technology can help.

Here are 10 common time wasting tasks to automate to free up time:

Sorting Emails

Before you get around to responding to emails, it helps to organize them. One of the best efficiency moves you can make is to use the label, tag and/or folder functions in your email program. That way, you can tackle important emails first, and less important ones later (or maybe never). It also helps you to “batch” emails for efficiency.

This Guy Sold His Startup for $575 Million in Cash — And Gets to Keep Every Penny | Entrepreneur

July 17, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

On Tuesday, the dating website Plenty of Fish got acquired by Match Group, an IAC/InterActive subsidiary that recently announced plans to go public later this year. Plenty of Fish sold to Match Group for $575 million in cash.

Markus Frind, 36, is the founder and CEO of the Vancouver-based Plenty of Fish.

Frind told Business Insider he started Plenty of Fish in 2003 “as a way to improve my résumé.”

“At the time there was a new programming language called ASP.NET, and I don’t like reading books, so I just went and created the site in two weeks, and then people started signing up, much to my surprise,” he said. “And it blew up from there. It wasn’t like I had a plan to create a dating site. It was just a side project I created that got really big.”

Frind, who was a developer before he founded Plenty of Fish, built the site without any venture-capital funding. He has retained complete ownership of the company, which has 75 employees.

“By the time I found out what VCs were, I was already making millions in profit, and I didn’t see the need to raise money because I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he told Business Insider. “It was a profitable company, and there was no need to raise money.”

The Future Of Retail Won’t Be So Good For Consumers | TechCrunch

July 17, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Shopping — both online and offline — is a great luxury of the modern era. People can enjoy a great selection at lower prices and shop from the convenience of their home, while still having the option of going to a local mall or retailer to peruse the aisles for instant gratification.

But consumers can’t have their cake and eat it, too, and the retail world as we know it today can no longer give it to them.

Retail Will Change Forever

Technology is killing the traditional retailer. Victims will include those selling commodity brand-name-type products like consumer electronics, appliances, sporting equipment and furniture, and may even include those selling consumable goods.

Price wars, combined with technology shifts, will eliminate national, regional and local competitors who just can’t keep up. Many of today’s vendors will cease to exist as online shopping takes larger shares of all sorts of markets. Just look at the trends in companies like Best Buy, Staples, Radio Shack and Sears.

Student Loans Stunting Small Business Growth | Business News Daily

July 17, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Student loans aren’t just negatively impacting you financially; they’re also hurting your chances of starting a new business, research finds.

Entrepreneurship is significantly hampered in parts of the country where residents carry more student loan debt, according to a recently updated study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

For the study, student loan debt across the United States was analyzed by county and compared with small business creation in those areas. Researchers discovered that between 2000 and 2010 a one standard deviation increase in student debt reduced small businesses in those counties by an average of 14 percent.

Customer Service Tips | Business Tips

July 16, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

I travel quite a bit, for both business and personal reasons, so I am exposed to many kinds of businesses across the U.S. I frequent small businesses but use large companies, as well.

With rising prices of goods and services, I expect the level of customer service to be high, as well. And it has become increasingly important to me.

In the past few weeks, I have experienced the worst customer service that I have in years— and it was from both small and large companies.

Do you have protocols for answering your phone, for greeting visitors, for trouble calls? If you don’t, you should. Some things don’t need to be left up in the air.

Whoever a potential customer interacts with first, establishes the impression of your company in that person’s mind.

Flash. Must. Die. | WIRED

July 16, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

ADOBE FLASH—THAT INSECURE, ubiquitous resource hog everyone hates to need—is under siege, again, and hopefully for the last time. The latest calls for its retirement come from some of the Internet’s most powerful players, but if the combined clattering of Facebook, Firefox, and a legion of unsatisfied users isn’t enough finally to put it in the ground, scroll down to see how to axe it from your devices yourself.

Why would you want to?

Because Flash is a closed, proprietary system on a web that deserves open standards. It’s a popular punching bag for hackers, which puts users at risk over and over again. And it’s a resource-heavy battery suck that at this point mostly finds its purchase in pop-up ads you didn’t want to see anyway.

Resetting and How It Can Help You Achieve Better Results | Getentrepreneurial

July 16, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

During a recent conversation about all that I try to juggle, a friend suggested I might want to embrace resetting as a regular practice. This was after I belted out a list of the roles which were important for me to not only to play, but to also be darn good at (!): a present Mom, impactful Coach, thriving Business Owner, attentive Wife, Daughter, Friend, etc. etc. etc. Whew! Makes me exhausted just thinking about all I sometimes try to do.

A quick look in the dictionary told me that one definition of “reset” is “to change the reading of” like a clock. I could go for that. Pausing, taking stock, breathing deeply, and then determining the “right” next step also seem a propos to me. Indeed, with these descriptors and given what I was trying to achieve, I could clearly see how resetting could be my ally.

Later that day, I went to a yoga class where the theme was, guess what? Resetting. Resetting the placement of my feet on the yoga mat so as to have a firm foundation. Hmmm, resetting and a firm foundation. So, does that mean that not taking the time to reset would cause my footing to be unsure? It would seem so.

Given the conversation I had just had with my friend an hour earlier, I couldn’t help but make the connection between my postural repositioning and my friend’s suggestion of resetting throughout my daily challenges. Not allowing the time it takes to reset, from the ground up, the flow of my daily life and the place of all the people in it leads to a lot of needless stumbling.

Skylodge Adventure Suites Suspended 400 Feet Above Ground | Designboom

July 15, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Hanging from a sheer cliff face in Peru’s sacred valley of Cuzco, three transparent capsules have been installed, providing accommodation for particularly intrepid guests. To reach the sleeping pods, lodgers must first climb 400 feet (122 meters), or hike an challenging trail using ziplines before enjoying the impressive views of the mystical valley.‬ ‪

Clinging to the rock face, the natura vive skylodge is composed of three capsules measuring 24 feet in length and 8 feet in height and width. each unit is handcrafted from aerospace aluminum and weather resistant polycarbonate, and comes complete with four beds, a dinning area and a private bathroom — separated from the bedroom by an insulated wall.

7 Content Marketing Misconceptions CMOs Are Tired of Hearing | All Business

July 15, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Content marketing is enjoying a nice stay of popularity as one of the most useful online marketing strategies of the modern era. It’s been adopted by small and large businesses of all kinds of industries, and marketers continue to scale up — in fact, 70 percent of B2B marketers are producing more content than they were a year ago.

By this point, most people have heard of content marketing, even if they don’t understand it, and as you might imagine, the misconceptions surrounding the strategy are rampant.

CMOs and other marketing experts immersed in the world of content marketing are tired of hearing these widespread misconceptions — and it’s worth your while to know why they aren’t true:

Inside Internet of Garbage: What When Wrong On Reddit | Forbes

July 15, 2015July 20, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Contract workers in San Francisco, processing thousands of complaints a day. Sweatshops in the Philippines, where outsourced labor decides what’s obscene and what’s permissible in a matter of seconds. Teams of anti-spam engineers in Mountain View, adapting to the latest wave of bots. An unpaid moderator on Reddit, picking out submissions that violate guidelines.

So much of the Internet is garbage, and much of its infrastructure and many man-hours are devoted to taking out the garbage. For the most part, this labor is hidden from plain sight. But in recent years, the garbage disposal has broken down. The social media companies have a harassment problem, the pundits have declared.

However, large-scale harassment campaigns are hardly new, and the barrage of crude and cruel messages and undesirable content is only a small part of what makes a targeted campaign a frightening experience for the victim. Yet this part of the equation—the part that is seemingly under the control of Silicon Valley—has received the most attention from the media, because it is the most public, visible and archivable. And as tech companies repeatedly fail to address the problem to everyone’s liking, the problem looms ever larger in the public imagination.